This is the story of a 70-year-old man who had to clear one of those roads. His name is Peter Foote and he is the private owner of a small ski resort called Mt Dobson about three hours south of Christchurch.

Peter Foote basically built the Mt Dobson skifield himself. He even constructed the road. It's a pretty good road by Kiwi skifield standards. A bit gravelly and a bit windy, but not a bad road. This week, however, there was no road. The road to Mt Dobson was completely buried under snow.

Dobson Road

Last week's storm brought over 2m of fluffy powder to Mt Dobson. Throw in the wind and that snow drifted to an incredible six metres in places. Peter Foote had only one option: clear it, and clear it as fast as he could.

Luckily, he'd shown a little foresight. Before the storm, Peter Foote took the precaution of leaving a snow-grooming machine halfway down the hill, at about the level where the rain usually turns to snow.

The snow fell lower than that in this storm. A lot lower. So Mr Foote drove as far up the hill as he could in the road grader, then walked. Picture it. A 70-year-old man wading through deep snow to reach a snow-grooming vehicle. He trudged two kilometres. He was up to his waist. And still he trudged, until finally, he reached the giant machine.

"It took us four days, three groomers and god knows how much fuel to get up to the skifield," Mr Foote told news.com.au. "It was the biggest dump we ever had for this time of the year. As fast as we pushed it off the road, it drifted in afterwards with the wind."

A couple of hours north at the larger and better-known skifield Mt Hutt, Resort operations manager James Urquhart faced similar problems. He, too, had to deal with metres and metres of snow on the road.

There was also avalanche danger everywhere. Urquhart dealt with that by setting off slides. In total, he used half a tonne of dynamite for the job. That's a lot of dynamite and a lot of slides.

Unfortunately, one of of the slides was a little too large, and took out the base station of one of the resort's three chairlifts. That's a problem which could take the rest of the season to resolve.

Brokwn chairlift

The avalanche also took out a pump station for the resort's snowmaking system. Fortunately, that's one piece of infrastructure the resort can live without for the rest of the year.

There was one other problem. With buildings buried, paths and rooves had to be cleared. But The 25 shovels on the hill were nowhere near enough. James Urquhart arrived in the feeder town of Methven just in time to grab the last available stock from local hardware store "Hammer Hardware".

The only problem then was the tired arms of resort staff.

"They're exhausted," Mr Urquhart said. "Every time they go to pick up a shovel their arms hurt and they say 'oh no, not again'. I feel for them."

Digging workers

With the skifields open at last after an epic week of digging, the good news is that a huge surge of visitors has already descended. Mt Hutt had 2000 skiers on opening day this week, and has seen a massive surge of Aussies flying in at short notice.

Peter Foote, too, expects a huge turnout when Mt Dobson opens this weekend. "If we get no more snow until the end of the year we've got more than enough to go around."

Funny he should say that, because there's yet another big blizzard forecast to hit New Zealand next week.